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This week’s photo challenge is ‘Spring’, and as usual, I’m late posting!

Spring in Southern New England is the brief time in between turning off the furnace and turning on the air conditioner. It usually lasts about two weeks. Once it’s over, we go into hazy, hot, and humid New England Summer. These brief weeks tend to be rainy, cloudy, and cold, with a few bright sunny days mixed in. So we try to get as much gardening done as possible now to take advantage of all the rain.

I tend to be a very unorganized gardener, which will be apparent as I describe these photos.

A month or so ago, I posted a photo of some vegetable seeds we had started; basil, dill, a few varieties of tomato, Swiss chard, and a few others. Though which tomato variety is which, I now have no idea. I’ve been trying to take them out for a few hours each day to harden them before transplanting, though most days have been too rainy and windy to do that. Maybe I’ll be able to transplant in a week or so.

Here are a few Iris bulbs, with some other perennials mixed in. have no idea what variety of Iris these are. A neighbor gave them to me many years ago. She had found next to an abandoned ginger ale bottling plant, so I call them the Ginger Ale Iris. They are a light yellow color so it seems to be an appropriate name.

Where did these tulips come from? I didn’t plant them, they just suddenly appeared among my rose bushes. Must have been left by the previous owners, though that was 14 years ago!

A hosta and some Tiger Lilies. In New England, if nothing else is going to grow somewhere, then plant some Tiger Lilies. Or just wait awhile and some will appear there anyway.

Usually Spring for me has meant a trip to Blanchette Gardens in Carlisle, Massachusetts. This is where I bought all of my perennials. Unfortunately, the owners retired last year, so I’ll have to find somewhere else to go. I’ll miss going there as it was a relaxing place to browse through their rows of native perennials, most of them very hard to find elsewhere. They sold their plants by their Latin names, with small plastic tags attached to each pot. I would keep each tag once I transplanted them, thinking that I would somehow keep track of them. But have I ever done that, No. So here’s a row of my perennials, just about all are from Blanchette, many have been here as long as I have been living here. Do I know the names of any of them ? Nope, not a single one!

I still have those tags with the Latin names somewhere, I should try to match up the names to the plants. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll do that.

A quick post since I don’t have a computer today, so I have to only use the iPhone with my big fat fingers on it’s tiny little keyboard, making frequent corrections to its autocorrect spelling assumptions.

For some reason, most of the plants in the garden are very late bloomers. A lack of planning on my part, I suppose.

The good thing is that this means that we have flowers well into October, the bad thing is that once we notice them blooming it means that Fall is here!

We see a lot of these plants in the forests when we go hiking, this must be why a lot of people say that we grow weeds!

The flower below is more than seven feet fall. It looms over everything else.

One of our neighbors has a bee hive, his bees go crazy in the garden this time of year. Probably since it’s such a large concentration of late blooming plants so close to their hive.

Probably a little bit of a stretch to fit into this theme, but I took these two photos today and kind of like how they turned out. The ‘unusual pov being that they’re not really the photos that I had intended to take at the time.

Mr. C and I went to a nearby farm in Pepperell, Massachusetts. He wanted to find a pond that we came across the last time we went here. It had several large frogs that were making an unusually loud chorus of croaks. We did find the pond, but the frogs were quiet today. Bu that’s OK, he decided to try to catch my shadow instead.

I would normally never take a photo like this, with such prominent shadows, but I do think it’s kind of cool, as it shows some action with Mr. C trying to get his shadow to grab my shadow.

I’ve never had much luck with photos while facing the sun, so this one is kind of a mistake, but I do like how the sunbeam looks like you could reach out and grab it. The funny thing is that when I took the photo with the sun at my back it did not come out very well at all.